Hobby Update: Orktober and the army begins!

Well, as I have said, I have managed to unearth a fairly sizable Oldhammer Orc army of figures dating from 1988 and before. And as my first hobby update with a painted WIP, a good place for Orktober to begin! It is not as many as I would like, but it is a great start considering it is just my unpainted and loose stuff. But one of the things I found out was that I was unable to locate all of my Orc and Gobbo crew for my war machines. I had a leadbelcher (and its crew) and a pair of skull crushers but only a few of the crew. I also had an old style Orc Stone Thrower (uses the same base as man-mangler but without the face. It was also missing the crew.

Luckily I was able to find an ebay group with 22 crew guys for those machines. I was also pretty happy with the price....wasn't dirt cheap but it also included a lead belcher and a skull crusher. The lead belcher was in perfect shape, but the skull crusher was missing the counter weight and one of the tines on its winder had snapped off. I was waiting on the Windsor & Newton Green Apple ink to arrive, and I decided to try to repair the Skull Crusher - after all, I'll be using mainly Boyz and Arrer Boys eventually but extra machines could not hurt. Now I could have cheated, as I have an extra counter weight to the more modern metal Rock Lobber (the 90s version) which of course is a dead ringer for the Skull Crusher, but I wanted to do something a little different.

It may seem like a weird cross, but we have a show on history channel called American Pickers (not sure if it goes out of the country or not), where 2 guys search through or "pick" through old stuff that people have been storing or hoarding to find really cool antique treasures. On one of those episodes, they went to a guy who had a bunch of the stones from old mills. Round stones with little grooves that would be turned by the windmill and process the grain (or smash up whatever stuff into meal). For some reason while I was thinking about what to use as a counter weight, I thought of my Orc horde (which does not have a name yet) rampaging across the Empire, their counter weight box crashes to the ground and breaks....so now what would they use that they could loot from just about any village....and I had an image of that grist mill stone. No they are big rocks, and heavy, so that would definitely "work".

Just a cool picture of a windmill because I like them....Wolf Creek GA, USA

I used a little greenstuff to make one. It was a pretty quick job, but I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

So here is a few WIP shots of the Skull Crusher with my modification (and fixed tine on the winder). It is a bit unpolished, and rough, but I don't think that goes against the Orc army at all. But it had enough "kit bassh" that I could envision the Orcs getting fun using the 'umies own stuff to hurt 'em. Now of course, I have a bunch of crewmen to paint as well, and they are helping me with the tones and practice using the new ink before I tackle my first project - those darn Ruglud's. More about them later on, though my next post will probably just show you how much I have yet to do....